Life Sciences Hub Wales

Life Sciences Hub Wales, based in Cardiff Bay, is the focal point for the sector in Wales – stimulating interaction, innovation, networking and collaboration.

As the heart of the life sciences sector in Wales, the Hub was designed to be home to a wide range of academic and clinical organisations, as well as funding bodies and professional and business services. Described as “a commercially-driven melting pot of talent”, the Hub aims to ensure that the Life Sciences sector is contributing more than £1 billion to the economy by 2022.

The Life Sciences sector is extremely broad, encompassing areas as diverse as medical technology, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, clinical testing, manufacturing, as well as research and development into new ways of improving health and wealth. In their own words, “Membership of the Hub will provide a single access point to explore finance, business support, expert advice and collaborative opportunities with clinical and academic partners for start-ups, SMEs, multinationals, existing businesses and investors.”

Our Challenge

The Hub is a multi-occupancy space, encouraging members to discuss and drive the development of the Life Sciences sector. They needed a website that would reflect the diversity of their ambitions.

The Life Sciences sector is hugely diverse, so to be memorable, they needed to be visually distinctive from other sector website around the world. This helped to serve their second objective: that the website needed to be a promotional tool and informational resource about the Hub itself.

Their third objective was to ensure the balance of contest with collaboration. The Life Sciences sector is developing quickly, so it’s intensely competitive, but its greatest achievements have been built on partnership and collaboration among innovators.

As well as standing out, the website needs to encourage co-operation between members of the Hub, and make it easy to communication with life sciences organisations around the world.

Our Solution

Our approach was to create a clean interface to showcase the Hub and manifest its ethos through dynamic content and intuitive functionality.

Sweeping film sequences capture the Hub’s amazing design, so the website feels like a natural extension of the physical space. We also added a subtle animation to the logo that constructs the Hub’s identity.

Reflecting the interconnected nature of the Hub, we combined tweets and images into a single scrolling feed, so that users could better understand the context of tweets without having to leave the site.

Tying in with the Hub’s mission of collaboration, we created an online noticeboard to allow both members of the Hub and its team to share information on funding, research, recruitment, and collaboration opportunities.

We also integrated the Hub’s Eventbrite listings into the website, to streamline the administration of their events.